Abstract
The first thing to say about Felicity Wood’s new book is that it is an immensely enjoyable read. Like many other UK academics involved in the 2018 pensions strike, I left the protest having realised that the marketisation of higher education is not the rational, evidence-led process of improving that it is sold as. Wood takes the critique of rationality and marketisation to its logical conclusion by seeing the influence of corporate norms on the higher education system specifically through the lens of magic and the occult. She develops a painstakingly assembled picture of an academia surrounded and infected with a dark magic, expressed through different spirits and rituals such as the all-seeing eye of audits (Chapter 4), the ritual sacrifices of ‘human resources’ (Chapter 10) and the magical dealings of consultants and institutional witch-hunting (sniffing out unprofitable departments) (Chapter 7). The result of these magical beings intruding into academia is that ‘in their attempts to become centres of corporate excellence, many academic institutions have become more arcane and sinister and may seem increasingly reliant on ritual, myths, mysticism and magic’ (p. 1).
While Wood, a lecturer at the University of Fort Hare, South Africa, focuses on African mythology and higher education, her insights transcend the continent and are relevant to all academic environments that have fallen under the spell of marketisation. While many of the magical creatures taken from African folklore will be new to western readers, the magic Wood describes is familiar. Furthermore, the inclusion of postcolonial theory offers insights that go deeper than a focus on purely western theory could have afforded.
For example, Wood describes academia as a ‘cargo cult’. Universities, she argues, have become replicas of the corporate world in which the wealth-giving rituals are imitated in the hope that the ‘magic of the market’ will bestow wealth onto the university. It is in this description of academia as an imitation of the corporate world that Wood’s analysis is strongest. By looking at the results of marketisation as rituals she is able to transcend a binary discussion of marketisation as a conflict between generating profit and academia’s ‘real’ goals. Wood makes clear how the marketisation of higher education is not necessarily best understood as an intrusion of market mechanisms in higher education but in the imitation of market rituals.
Later on, in her analysis Wood gives an additional reading of the corporate university; she invokes the figure of the mamlambo (p. 161), a South African supernatural being which seduces its victims with promises to grant them their innermost desires. The fulfilment of these desires, however, comes at a terrible price. Thus, in the pursuit of wealth, universities have to sacrifice values like collegiality and ultimately the souls of their staff who are turned into zombies. Wood then turns her eye to the ‘Culture of Fear’ which pervades many universities. In Chapter 4 she looks at how the ‘terror of managerialism’ uses rituals of degradation and authoritarianism to produce cowed, obedient workers. She focuses specifically on the role of audits and casualised working conditions to discipline workers.
Wood really comes into her own in the second half of her book where she explores how confusion about salary structures and evaluation processes are used in order to create an atmosphere of opaque mystery in which university staff, like Alice in Wonderland, ‘feel that they inhabit an unstable, unpredictable world within which the ground rules constantly change’ (p. 150). This climate of fear and confusion, combined with the expectations of ever-rising workloads, ultimately turns academics into zombies, into human resources, the ultimate symbol of the commodified human being. Through having to perform uncountable alienating tasks which increasingly crowd out activities that academics would otherwise see as their natural task (i.e. research and teaching), academics begin to feel ‘deprived of the intellectual and imaginative space to adequately explore alternative possibilities and freer, more fulfilling ways to be’ (p. 157).
In her final, short chapter, Wood gives some ideas of how the spell might be broken. Most interestingly, she also defines the purpose of her book as one of ‘defamiliarisation’: By juxtaposing elements of the southern African supernatural and other aspects of mystery and magic with the ethos, structures and praxis of corporate academia and the economic systems of power and control underpinning them, parts of the status quo are defamiliarised. In the process, the strange, contradictory and damaging features have been highlighted, along with their ominous absurdities and areas of unseen menace. (p. 193)
Measuring the purpose of Wood’s book by her own goal, she more than achieves what she sets out to do. Describing corporate universities as places of the occult lets the reader understand the damages of marketisation – not just as unintended consequences but as meaningful in themselves. It is an exciting read for anyone trying to understand the nature of today’s higher education sector.